Posts by Rafael 42 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2007
"Unless they've been created for A5, they're just not readable." -- I've noticed that this review (and others) does not explain well the PDF conversion/display issue, i.e. can I simply get a bunch of non-DRM, free PDFs and put them on these devices?
I have a whole bunch of papers, thesis and other boring^H^H academic PDFs I'd like to be able to read in a e-reader. Tried that once with Adobe Palm Reader and the Palm TX and it was unbearable. I'd like to know which of those readers can display a PDF without reformatting it (a la Palm Reader) and removing/mutilating all graphics.
Did I miss this information?
"I do sometimes wonder whether anyone actually uses all this technology?"
Who cares? With new languages there will be new books, new training courses, new certifications, new blogs, new magazines and new opportunities for me to scream with undergrad students who want to take a CS course to "learn the new hot cool language". Little twerps.
I'd buy a "The Databases Are Coming! The Databases Are Coming!" T-shirt. Do some 50's style artwork on it, similar to those horrible movies about giant robots (or 50-feet tall woman!) rampaging with some people running from it. 50's style hats for the men, cutesy dresses for the women. All screaming in horror.
So, here is the idea, if you use it at least send an XXXL to me :-)
@Joe Zeff
No hard feelings :-) but I did all steps when the updates-newkey thingie was released. What I was complaining about is that from some time "yum check-update" didn't return new releases. Some time ago it showed a new 2.6.26.3-1 kernel, but no fglrx so far, so booting that kernel is sort of pointless for me (I have the old kernel version so I can boot the computer to an usable state).
There are 52 new updates today, but no fglrx. The latest updates also broke kpdf (which refused to open PDF files, I had to recreate some file associations -- shouldn't be related to updates, but who knows?) and created some removable devices mounting annoyances.
I've refused to use Suse or Ubuntu in the past simply because of sheer laziness -- I am more used to Fedora, know something about the tools and where the configuration files are, couldn't bother even to run YAST, etc. Since I had those problems I had to spend some time working to solve things that weren't broken before, by changing I will at least learn something new. And I've read some nice things about opensolaris too...
So thanks for the comments, here is an peace angel icon for y'all.
The lack of infrastructure, electricity, telephone, etc. is a problem, but the worst is that people are blindingly embracing the idea without considering an education plan behind it -- where is the (adequate, localized) content? Where is the training for the teachers who will use, indirectly, the laptop? Do they really believe that all they need to do is give the laptop to the kids and voilá, problem solved?
Just read http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/16/krstic_olpc/ for some thoughts on what OLPC's (lack of) educational goals. The money spent on those toys could be better used to solve other educational problems.
BTW, El Reg, why can't we comment on Andrew Orlowski' stories?
"Say I want to know where a given planet will be tonight at 10pm"...
Use celestia or stellarium?
@AC - Sorry for being a spoilsport. There is enough weirdness in the universe *without* the artifacts, just search for it (hint: Seyfert's sextet - no need for puny space death rays)
Rafael, amateur astrogeek
Just a naive question: I recall seeing those "click here for free 3d screensavers" in some more-or-less reputable sites (sorry, don't remember which one, but one was the site of a comics publisher). There were also several ads for "free ringtones", usually disguised as a silly flash game.
Assuming those ads were links to malware, how did they go into those sites? Even if they are randomly selected from an ad server, shouldn't the people who put those ads be responsible for the dissemination of this stuff?
I maintain the effort is *useless* without proper support -- training, maintenance, reposition, content creation in Portuguese -- do you trust our government to do it? Without it how is it going to reduce the digital divide?
It is just yet another waste of money from a government that likes to be seen doing things.
xjy got it right -- solving illiteracy is way more important. Ability to learn and use knowledge is a far more effective tool for citizenship than a shiny nifty probably-unsupported toy.
"On another point, I was under the impression the OLPC was for countries like Brazil where there is huge poverty, but the country is not a basket case"
I am not a MIT super visionary - I am just a brazilian who used to teach programming languages in college, until I gave up completely on trying to teach 18-25 year old students who were clearly not interested in "computers as tools for learning" but in "computers as tools for gaming and orkut".
My personal point of view is that the OLPC effort will be useless, regardless of the usability of the software, it is a tech toy that will be sold for money for food or drugs, will have no support at all from the government who bought them ("our work is done!") and will be totally meaningless in remote communities.
Our worst problem *is* education, but tackling it requires changes in basic education, better salaries for K-12 professors, better schools. I couldn't find a single word on how the teachers and students will be trained to use the colorful new toys. Who'll do it -- are the toys really that intuitive?
Send the disk or whatever to Hollywood. I bet Sandra Bullock or Keanu Reeves can crack its protection and give the police the contents in seconds.
The best post in this thread was the one with "by hiding the encryption, you're in fact stating you're hiding something incriminating and should be treated as such"... posted by a Anonymous Coward, who apparently does not have anything to hide. Oh, the irony!
Cobol? Fortran?
The way basic CS courses are taught are more important than the language itself. On the other hand it is quite hard to motivate students to learn languages such as ADA, Lisp, Prolog and such.
Yet another case of "I hate it, refuse to learn it therefore it is crap"?
Oh, PL-1, wherefore art thou?
Rafael
"On the other hand, where businesses claim to be universally in favour of innovation, this is a recipe for hypocrisy." - Uh?
Universally as in "I don't care how much that new technology costs and whether it will help me, but I will embrace it because I am a clueless moron with no capacity whatsoever of thinking by myself except on issues whether where to get a I (heart) wikipedia tattoo"?
Let's invent an artificial working hemorrhoid (tm Dave Barry) and go around asking the "universally in favour of innovation" whether they are really, really interested in pluggin it on their butts.
Can't comment on Facebook, but Orkut is quite popular in Brazil, and it is really amazing the amount of time people waste on it. It's like a giant, ever-muting gossip magazine-cum-big-brother where anyone can enter. I wonder if the inventors of this kind of drivel will ever be judged by crimes against humanity.
Rafael
Whenever I see someone say "we need another language" I read as "we need to squeeze more IT money in training, certification and 800-page in-a-nutshell, for-dummies or in-24-hours books and people won't fall for this with languages which already have more books about it than there are self-help books".
I am a Java fanboi. Is it really bloated? Won't the new, marvelous, light, enhanced language suffer the same destiny later? I wouldn't mind having the AWT removed (at least most of it) but it seems a case of fixing what ain't broken.
Before the flame war starts, I was a Pascal fanboi, and a (shudder) Prolog fanboi way back, before Borland stabbed our collective backs.
So there's an entry on Wikipedia just about age of consent in Asian countries?
Web 2.0 is awesome! Beat that, Brittanica!
We should have a El Reg's sponsored contest on the wackiest wikipedia entry.
Just to avoid people making even crazier shit the entries should be at least two months old. And I should get a XXL El Reg t-shirt for thinking yet another way they can write stuff without doing real research :-)
The phrase "it's an exciting and important new technology that could help to change the way we build Web applications" scares me in many levels.
Whenever I read this I guess that the only people that are going to be really, really excited are writers and publishers. Expect an onslaught of titles on this exciting, new technology soon.
What about Linux browsers? Will need to download runtimes too?
Well, 50 years ago we were promised robots, flying cars, cheap and reliable space travel, etc.
Whenever I see this kind of gullibility in the media I think of ways to make money on that. One that comes to mind is to open an "International University of Futurology" where pseudo-boffin wannabees could defend their PhDs in wildly guessed, utterly unprovable and inane themes, like:
* In 2030 television will be broadcasted directly into your brain.
* In 2090 nanobots will be able to cure any kind of health problems, and will be delivered nasally throught scratch-and-sniff interfaces in your own computer monitor (making life easier for spammers, too).
* In 2210 sex organs will be plug-and-play, you will be able to change them as you like.
* In 2300 most of mankind will be rendered so stupid due to lack of common sense, sloppy education and media influence that they will be unable to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Wait, change the date on that last one.
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